Restriction endonucleases are enzymes that cleave double-stranded DNAs in a sequence-specific manner (Roberts, R. J., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 102:5905-5908 (2005); Roberts, et al., Nucleic Acids Res, 31:1805-1812 (2003); Roberts, et al., Nucleic Acids Res, 33:D230-232 (2005); Alves, et al., Restriction Endonucleases, “Protein Engineering of Restriction Enzymes,” ed. Pingoud, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg, New York, 393-407 (2004)). They are ubiquitously present among prokaryotic organisms (Raleigh, et al., Bacterial Genomes Physical Structure and Analysis, Ch. 8, eds. De Bruijin, et al., Chapman & Hall, New York, 78-92 (1998)), in which they form part of restriction-modification systems, which mainly consist of an endonuclease and a methyltransferase. The cognate methyltransferase methylates the same specific sequence that its paired endonuclease recognizes and renders the modified DNA resistant to cleavage by the endonuclease so that the host DNA can be properly protected. However, when there is an invasion of foreign DNA, in particular bacteriophage DNA, the foreign DNA will be degraded before it can be completely methylated. The major biological function of the restriction-modification system is to protect the host from bacteriophage infection (Arber, Science, 205:361-365 (1979)). Other functions have also been suggested, such as involvement in recombination and transposition (Carlson, et al., Mol Microbiol, 27:671-676 (1998); Heitman, Genet Eng (NY), 15:57-108 (1993); McKane, et al., Genetics, 139:35-43 (1995)).
The specificity of the approximately 3,000 known restriction endonucleases for their greater than 250 different target sequences could be considered their most interesting characteristic. After the discovery of the sequence-specific nature of the first restriction endonuclease (Danna, et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 68:2913-2917 (1971); Kelly, et al., J Mol Biol, 51:393-409 (1970)), it did not take long for scientists to find that certain restriction endonucleases cleave sequences which are similar but not identical to their defined recognition sequences under non-optimal conditions (Polisky, et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 72:3310-3314 (1975); Nasri, et al., Nucleic Acids Res, 14:811-821 (1986)). This relaxed specificity is referred to as star activity of the restriction endonuclease. It has been suggested that water-mediated interactions between the restriction endonuclease and DNA are the key differences between specific complexes and star complexes (Robinson, et al., J Mol Biol, 234:302-306 (1993); Robinson, et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 92:3444-3448 (1995), Sidorova, et al., Biophys J, 87:2564-2576 (2004)).
Star activity is a problem in molecular biology reactions. Star activity introduces undesirable cuts in a cloning vector or other DNA. In cases such as forensic applications, where a certain DNA substrate needs to be cleaved by a restriction endonuclease to generate a unique fingerprint, star activity will alter a cleavage pattern profile, thereby complicating analysis. Avoiding star activity is also critical in applications such as strand displacement amplification (Walker, et al., Proc Natl Acad Sci USA, 89:392-396 (1992)) and serial analysis of gene expression (Velculescu, et al., Science, 270:484-487 (1995)).